DIALOGUE AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Dialogue is one of the most abused words in contemporary political discourse. It is often assumed to be the answer to all conflict. The refrain is "if only they would enter into dialogue all this would be solved." In fact, dialogue both more difficult and less powerful than this.
Dialogue is undoubtedly an absolutely essential part of the process of conflict resolution. Any conflict will involve misunderstandings. It is difficult to communicate with someone that you are in conflict with. The longer a conflict goes on, the greater these misunderstandings become.
The appearance of violence triggers and intensifies a number of processes. Small, specific issues become subordinated to large, generalised ones. Issues proliferate. Concrete events come to be seen as functions of abstract ideas and metanarratives. Most conflicts are contagious as the effects spread beyond the conflict area.
So, for instance, the rise of the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland, which should really have been something which brought people together in common interest quickly came to be seen in sectarian terms. As violence entered the equation in 1969, the process intensified. By the mid 1970's, everything the Civil Rights movement had campaigned for had been granted, but by now the long-standing ethnic conflict had superseded the original one. It was twenty years before paramilitary ceasefires brought a limited end to the killing.
Further processes occur during violent conflict. Societies become heavily militarised. We see the rise of warlordism, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Somalia are examples. Warlords only exist because they know how to use violence. They have a vested interest in its continuation. Ethnocentrism increases. Drukulic's Balkan Express, offers a fascinating account of the way in which people in Yugoslavia retreated into ethnic camps as that country collapsed. Parties to conflict become physically separated, if only because security is found in numbers. This exaggerates territorialism.
There are socio-psychological processes as well. The construction of an enemy image is a commonly occurring phenomenon. This includes stereotyping, which allows people to treat individuals as part of a group first and foremost. This leads to dehumanisation. Scapegoating is common, where the enemy is blamed for all the ills of the world. Groups will rely on the attribution of motives. If genuine communication is impossible then people will effectively make up reasons that explain the enemies actions. All this leads to demonization, where the enemy is seen as the personification of evil rather than a human being.
The first thing to say about dialogue, therefore, is that it is necessary. The second is that it is difficult. People often enter into dialogue thinking that they are doing so with the purpose of persuading the other side to agree with their point of view. In fact, everyone involved has to accept that they are going to listen as much as talk. They need to accept that they will hear things they don't want to hear; that they will be wrong about some things and that when their enemy is wrong it is because of the conflict processes referred to above rather than some inherent fallibility.
A further point is that these processes effect everyone in a society in conflict. Addressing them cannot be achieved by bringing elites around a table. Everyone needs to be engaged. Again, Northern Ireland illustrates the point. The Death of the Peace Process?, a pamphlet written by Michael Hall in 1997 describes how contacts between grassroots organisations stopped once the political "peace process" began. At this point, the process became defined by the need to get the best possible deal for "our" side. We still hear the line about how the people want peace if only the politicians would stop holding it up as if the politicians had fallen from the sky rather than having been elected by us.
So the point of dialogue is to cut through all of the above to find the actual conflict of interests. And there will be a genuine conflict to be found. Contrary to some of the more naive observers of war, people never, ever fight because of a misunderstanding. The misunderstandings are always there but they are an effect of conflict and not its cause.
This means that getting through all the misunderstandings can only be the start of the process. A "real conflict of interests" means that both sides to the conflict are pursuing aims which are simply incompatible. You cannot have Northern Ireland as part of the UK and a United Ireland that is independent from the UK. You just can't. What you can have is some sort of compromise between the two things. The short term curse of the peace process has been the question of the decommissioning of weapons. The long term curse is that everyone involved is still pursuing exactly the same aims as before. In other words, the "real conflict of interests" remains.
Conflict theorists are aware of the dilemma. The Peace Process to date is no longer described in the literature as one of Conflict Resolution but one of Conflict Transformation. No longer a violent conflict but a political one. This is surely an improvement, but when does the resolution process begin. The danger is that it won't ever because we get complacent. We mustn't let this happen.