So I have to say.
Hello and welcome. My name is Liz Carmichael and I'm a co-convener of UX peace.
I'm happy to welcome you to this rerecording of the opening talk at the annual conference of UX peace,
the Oxford Network of Peace Studies, given in Oxford on Saturday the 18th of May, 2024.
The conference theme is New Actors and the Changing Field in Peacemaking and Peacebuilding.
During the opening session with the speakers in person,
we had a problem with the recording and we are grateful to the two opening speakers for rerecording separately their talks.
Just after the event. Welcome to this first talk by professor Roger McGinty, recorded on zoom with the added bonus of his PowerPoint presentation.
Roger Mckinty is professor at the School of Government and International Affairs and director of the Durham Global Security Institute,
both at Durham University. He is co-editor of the journal peacebuilding and co-founder of Everyday Peace Indicators.
He works on the interface between bottom up and top down approaches to peace.
Roger, thank you for being with us. And we welcome you to speak on limits and alternative approaches to peacemaking.
Roger McGinty. Thank you lose. And thank you to everyone at Oxford Peace for organising this.
And congratulations to OCS, PS for simply being there and talking about peace.
Indeed it's important, I think, that we talk about peace in times of war.
It's important that we talk about what peace might mean.
There's a lot of talk about war at the moment.
And in fact, some people say that we're in a 1930s moment, and I have some sympathy with that view.
In fact, some people say that multilateralism is under immense stress and that there is a greater emphasis no UN security alliances, uncertainly.
We see that with the expansion of NATO, we see the outbreak of wars, many of these wars with potential to become regional or indeed global wars.
We see the rise of populist movements across Europe, central South America and elsewhere.
We see rearmament campaigns.
Indeed, recently, the Sipri figures have shown that there was a year on year 6.8 increase in global armed spending between 2022 and 2023.
That meant that a total of $202,443 billion was spent on arms last year.
In fact, the US government in 2022 spent $48 billion with Lockheed Martin, the arms manufacturer.
That's almost the size of the entire UK defence budget.
And in April of this year, the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, put the UK defence industry on what he called a war footing.
But of course, there was another 1930s.
There was the 1930s in which some brave people talked about peace.
People like Vera Brittan or Victor Galanos or those involved in the Peace Pledge Union.
Many of them had been scarred by their experiences of World War One, and they didn't want to see another global conflict.
So it is important in times of flux to reflect and to look forward and to evaluate the role of peace in our time.
And. In this talk, I want to consider alternatives to current approaches to peace,
and I want to consider either tolerance or possibly lack of tolerance to those alternatives.
So what are your limits in relation to peace?
What are your red lines? In fact, do we have red lines?
And do new actors and new approaches change fundamentally what we mean or might mean by peace?
Let me. Whet your appetite for these red lines.
These questions about alternatives to peace through an example.
And it's a micro example that comes from the everyday peace indicators.
And through those indicators, we ask community members to identify their own measures of peace.
What does peace mean to them? So rather than relying on experts or scholars to define indicators of peace or change,
we ask community members themselves to determine what peace might look like.
So, for example, in Afghanistan, we have things like people having antennas, television antennas on rooftops.
That means they can watch whatever they want without censorship or social control from the Taliban or fuel stations being open during the night.
It's a sign of security. It's a sign that there is some form of peace, or perhaps female vaccinators coming to our village.
It's a sign that females can work. Females can travel, but also that there is some form of public health at work.
So we ask people what peace like means to them.
And in Sri Lanka, the Everyday Peace team were working on the issue of reconciliation.
And in a focus group involving Sinhalese people, Sinhalese or the majority in Sri Lanka, they ask what would peace mean in your life?
In everyday life? And someone said, well, peace would mean that the Tamils sat at the back of the bus, that they knew their place.
Well, this took us aback. Because.
It reminded us of Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s where African-Americans had to sit at the back of the bus.
It reminded us of racism. But troublingly this was racism or bigotry genuinely held.
We were dumbfounded. We were uncomfortable.
But actually, many of the things that are happening in relation to peace at the moment raise tricky ethical and practical problems.
And I want to come on to some of those later. When we sketch the current.
Seeing of peacebuilding the current landscape.
In terms of peace, it might be worth thinking in terms of a ledger, in terms of deficits and surpluses.
So let me begin with the deficit.
And it's quite a list, for example.
Political leaders in the West rarely talk about democracy or human rights anymore.
When you think back to the early 2000s, you may or may not have an opinion on Tony Blair or Bill Clinton,
but they actually did talk about human rights and democracy.
It's worth noting that there are no new UN peacekeeping missions.
We know demonstrably that peacekeeping works.
Yet, for various reasons, the UN has not instituted any new peacekeeping missions in many years.
In fact, two weeks ago, the UN Security Council voted to start withdrawing from Congo.
There are few comprehensive peace accords anymore.
Indeed, there are few. Peace processes.
Comprehensive peace processes. Any more?
We can say that the liberal international order is fragmenting.
That. The rules based international order is under strain.
Now, this is not to romanticise that international order.
It caused many problems, but it did give some guide rails and protections.
It did improve and save some lives.
But that order is gone. The liberal piece is over and it's not coming back.
We see the rise of authoritarian conflict management, in which there is no attempt at negotiated outcomes.
And David Lewis, Claire Smith and many, many others have written very well on this.
I'm talking about states like Israel or Saudi Arabia or Myanmar or Sri Lanka,
in which it's demonstrable that there is little interest in negotiated outcomes in relation to conflict.
Instead, there is the pursuit of military outcomes.
We've also seen the securitisation of migration in many places in the United States, in North Africa, in parts of the Middle East and Europe.
We see the return of very old technology, the technology of fences, the technology of wire fences.
In an age of digital technology.
The Europe that celebrated the pulling down of the Berlin Wall is the same Europe
that has built nearly 2000km of anti-migrant fencing over the past few years.
In fact, we see a 19th century technology coming back that technology of transportation.
It used to be that. Convicts were transported to Australia and other far away territories.
Now the UK is proposing to transport migrants to Rwanda, so this deficit list is pretty long.
But perhaps what's most damning is that political leaders don't seem to have optimism in relation to peace.
They don't seem to have what might might be called the vision thing.
Instead, politics tends to be reactive, tends to be inward looking.
And as I said, the liberal peace is over and it's not coming back.
But let's look at the surplus side of the ledger on that.
Actually, there's probably more peacebuilding and peacemaking activity going on than we might first anticipate.
So, for example, actually there have been a large number of peace accords at the local level, amnesties and indeed Covid ceasefires.
Much of this was unreported. Indeed, Christine Bell and her team at Edinburgh University found 101 Covid ceasefires.
They also found 344 written local peace accords between 1990 and 2023.
That's a lot of peacemaking activity, much of it unreported.
We also need to pay attention to on the ground every day.
Peace. My own research with others looking at the micro dynamics of peace in.
Colombia, Lebanon and Northern Ireland has shown that there is a lot of on the ground peacemaking activity.
In fact, if we look at this study, we can see that people are very good at avoidance there.
They also have a wide repertoire of other activities such as negotiation, cooperation, monitoring, involvement in politics.
And what this points to is actually the common sense of people.
And if we look at the smaller of the pie charts, we can see that the majority of activities that people engage in can be classed as non escalation.
And indeed there is a lot of de-escalation.
And what this shows is that people are not engaging in escalatory activity.
The downside of this is that conflicts are often stuck in a holding pattern.
And therefore we have long lasting conflicts.
But if there is a basic level of security.
Then people and communities often find their own forms of tolerance.
They find their own level, their own modus vivendi.
I'm not romanticising this, but sometimes communities find their own peace.
Also on the positive side of the ledger,
we see immense and very brave work on unarmed civilian protection in places like Colombia or Kenya or Uganda, or the fringes of Mayan law.
We also see inspiring transnational social movements.
I'm thinking about activism on climate change, on the women, peace and security agenda,
and indeed campus protests in relation to the Israeli assault on Gaza.
And in fact, one of the hugely underreported stories of our time is just how peaceful those protests have been.
Just how peaceful? Multiple dozens, probably hundreds of.
Gaza related protests on university campuses have been peaceful.
We also see the promise of peace tech, the ability and promise of technology in helping intergroup relations, pro-social and pro-peace relations.
We've seen an alternative security review in the UK that worked parallel to drawing up, uh, official command paper.
We saw activists and those interested stakeholders thinking, well, what would security look like if it put people at the centre,
if it was conscious of human security, if it was conscious of the importance of ecological security.
We've also seen an increased awareness of the links between humanitarianism, peacebuilding and development.
With the United Nations.
With the United Nations championing the issue of a triple nexus that tries to integrate approaches to all three.
In fact, it's worth noting at a time when many leaders in the West are disavowing peace.
The international architecture for peace has never been more sophisticated.
It has never been in such a research based place.
We've seen the.
Increase development of an international peace architecture.
We've seen the newly reformed UN Peacebuilding Commission and Peacebuilding Fund.
We've seen the creation of UN mediation teams.
We've seen peace being one of the SDGs.
The Secretary-General has been pushing a sustainable peace agenda and also attempting
to rework the seminal 1992 agenda for peace document into a new agenda for peace.
And on top of that formal institutionalisation,
we see an immense amount of activity and indeed experience in the third sector in terms of pro peace and pro civil civil society.
So, so far I've been talking about a ledger, which is a bit binary, negative and positive, but there is a lot.
That is ambiguous, that it's difficult to place in the ledger.
There are a lot of issues that present us with ethical and practical challenges.
Many of these are not new. They are instead perhaps newly visible or more visible.
Certainly the peacemaking and peacebuilding landscape has become much more complex.
As Mateo, Peter and others have argued. We see a fragmentation of the peacebuilding space.
Western assumptions on peace are being challenged, and that poses questions for us.
Just how comfortable are we with this?
In fact, I struggle to come up with the right lexicon to describe the different approaches to peace the West,
the global North, the global South, alternatives, non traditional approaches.
None of these terms seem to adequately capture what we're trying to see at the moment.
We see a masala of new actors and new approaches.
We see a lot of flux at the moment.
And all of this leads to fundamental question.
Does this new or newly visible approach to peace mean that peace itself is changing?
Peacemaking. Then we can see Omani mediators working in Yemen, or we see private peace entrepreneurs.
We see, in a sense, self-appointed actors who are well connected, who are networked, trying to see if they can mediate.
We see Chinese mediation in relation to to Iran and Saudi Arabia.
China has been a major peacekeeping contributor over the past number of years, both in terms of personnel and resources.
50,000 Chinese peacekeepers have served in 30 peacekeeping missions.
In fact, in March 2024, there were all.
The field. There were 27 from the United States.
And if we remember back to June 2023, there was an African peacekeeping mission or an African peace mission to Ukraine and Russia.
In fact, a few months before that, there had been a Chinese peace plan for Ukraine.
And if you remember the media commentary in relation to the African peace Mission to Ukraine and Russia.
It was very patronising. It was along the lines of these guys don't know what they're up to.
These guys are out of their depth. They don't know the context.
They are very insensitive. They're just interested in publicity.
Good publicity at home. But hang on.
If we remember the liberal peace interventions of the 1990s and the 2000s.
The criticism. Of those interventions was exactly the same.
That these interventions in the former Yugoslavia, in parts of West Africa and elsewhere were shallow,
were transactional, were linked to development or extraction, that the interveners were insensitive to context.
They weren't listening. So we all want to diversify peace.
We all want to decolonise peace.
And in fact, if we look at this word peace, it does not refuse prefix us.
There are multiple ways we can describe this peace.
But what are our limits? Do we have red lines in terms of what we would accept in terms of peace?
For example, do we see gender inclusion as a red line or a universality of human rights?
Do we see that as non negotiable?
In many ways, these questions are not new. There has been a mixed economy of peacemaking in place for many years.
This is an era of multi colorism.
There is an uneasy competition between unilateral realism on one hand and the pragmatic multilateralism on the other.
Yes, there are many difficult things to accept.
Many challenges, like they're the nature of peace has always been contested, so I'm not sure that the territory we occupy is particularly new.
What is new?
I think for those challenge, those in the West or the global North is that peace is being decentralised from the West or the global North.
And maybe. That is not a bad thing.
So thank you for your patience and your attention.