THEORY AND PRACTICE IN ETHNIC CONFLICT MANAGEMENT

ETHNIC AND INTERCOMMUNITY CONFLICT SERIES

General Editors: Seamus Dunn, Professor of Conflict Studies and Director, Centre for the Study of Conflict, and Valerie Morgan, Professor of History and Research Associate, Centre for the Study of Conflict, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland

With the end of the Cold War, the hitherto concealed existence of a great many other conflicts, relatively small in scale, long-lived, ethnic in character and intra- rather than inter-state has been revealed. The dramatic changes in the distribution of world power, along with the removal of some previously resolute forms of centralised restraint, have resulted in the re-emergence of older, historical ethnic quarrels, many of which either became violent and warlike or teetered, and continue to teeter, on the brink of violence. For these reasons, ethnic conflicts and consequent violence are likely to have the greatest impact on world affairs during the next period of history.

This new series examines a range of issues related to ethnic and inter­community conflict. Each book concentrates on a well-defined aspect of ethnic and intercommunity conflict and approaches it from a comparative and international standpoint.

Rather than focus on the macrolevel, that is on the grand and substantive matters of states and empires, this series argues that the fundamental causes of ethnic conflict are often to be found in the hidden roots and tangled social infrastructures of the opposing separated groups. It is through the understanding of these foundations and the working out of their implications for policy and practical activity that may lead to ameliorative processes and the construction of transforming social mechanisms and programmes calculated to produce longterm peace.

Theory and Practice in Ethnic Conflict Management Theorizing Success and Failure

Edited by

Marc Howard Ross William R. Kenan. Jr, Professor of Political Science Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania USA

and

Jay Rothman Director, the ARIA Group Inc and Scholar-in-Residence McGregor School of Antioch University Yellow Springs Ohio USA

First published in Great Britain 1999 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-349-41221-1 DOI 10.1057/9780230513082

ISBN 978-0-230-51308-2 (eBook)

First published in the United States of America 1999 by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

ISBN 978-0-312-22046-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Theory and practice in ethnic conflict management: theorizing success and failure / edited by Marc Howard Ross and Jay Rothman. p. cm. - (Ethnic and inter-community conflict) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-22046-4 (cloth) I. Conflict management. 2. Culture conflict. 3. Ethnic relations-Political aspects. I. Ross, Marc Howard. II. Rothman, Jay. III. Series. HM136.T478 1999 303.6'9-<1c21 98-32035

CIP ----.-.----

Selection, editorial matter, Chapters I and 13 © Marc Howard Ross and Jay Rothman 1999 Chapter 8 © Robert Mulvihill and Marc Howard Ross 1999 Chapter 10 © Jay Rothman 1999 Chapters 2-7, 9, II, 12 © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 978-0-333-75102-2

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.

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To Donald T. Campbell, Teacher and Friend

Contents

General Editors' Preface ix

~a ~

Notes on the Contributors xv

1 Issues of Theory and Practice in Ethnic Conflict Management Marc Howard Ross and Jay Rothman 1

2 Reflections on Theory and Practice in a Thirty Year Old Problem-Solving Workshop Christopher Mitchell 24

3 From Changing Governments to Building Networks: The Evolution of Goals in The Conflict Management Group's Project in the Former Soviet Union Miek Bo/tjes 34

4 Organizing Conflict Resolution Interventions in Situations of Rapid Change: The South African Transition Jaco Cilliers 60

5 Catholic Relief Services' Peacebuilding Role in the Republic of Macedonia: Using Humanitarian Assistance to Promote Democratic Awareness and Civic Participation Janie Leatherman 81

6 Addressing Kurdish Separatism in Turkey Meltem Mil/tUler-Bac 103

7 Resolving the Hopi-Navajo Land Dispute: Official and Unofficial Interventions Tamra Pearson d'Estree 120

8 Understanding the Pluralistic Objectives of Conflict Resolution Interventions in Northern Ireland Robert Mulvihill and Marc Howard Ross 143

9 Moving Towards Peace in Jerusalem David Gorman 161

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viii Contents

10 Articulating Goals and Monitoring Progress in a Cyprus Conflict Resolution Training Workshop Jay Rothman 176

11 Building a Sustainable Peace in Guatemala Karin Lucke 195

12 Evaluating Evaluation in Ethnic Conflict Resolution: Themes from, and Commentary on, the Haverford-Bryn Mawr Conference Joseph P. Folger 209

13 Conclusion: Integrating Evaluation into the Intervention Process Marc Howard Ross and Jay Rothman 240

Index 255

General Editors' Preface

This new book is one of a series of books on ethnic and inter­community conflict. The series concentrates on international and comparative aspects of conflict, and it has an overarching and co­herent philosophy within which each individual book will fit, so that as the series grows, the central and essential questions will become illuminated with ever-increasing width and depth.

The series reflects the growing awareness of the existence around the world of a great many conflicts, relatively small in scale, long­lived, ethnic in character, and internal rather than inter-state. Many of them, of course, remain hidden in that the media has not yet found a reason to bring them centre-stage: those that suddenly become visible usually do so because there are good pictures of starving children, or of boy soldiers. Very often this new-found fame disappears as quickly as it appeared.

In addition, the continuing existence of a number of long-lived quarrels (such as Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, The Middle East, Sri Lanka) indicates that the persistence and virulence of such conflicts will not be transformed by any simple remedy. Ethnic conflicts and the violence that is usually associated with them are, therefore, likely to have the greatest impact on world affairs during the next period of history. Already the structure, constitution and rationale of international institutions are being affected: this is shown, for example, by the composition of the UN as a body representative of states, rather than nations; the reluctance of the UN to interfere in what are deemed to be within-state conflicts; the increasing difficulty in policing the world; the growth in regional UN-like organizations; and so on.

This book, edited by Marc Howard Ross and lay Rothman, looks in particular at a number of aspects of conflict management in parts of the world ranging from South Africa, to Turkey, lerusalem, Guatemala and others. It sets out to examine the dynamics of con­flicts, and how they evolve, mutate, and - sometimes - become transformed. The book places emphasis on the role of grass-roots and voluntary organizations, and on organizations that are sep­arate from (and often independent of) governments. The intention is to describe, analyse and understand how these organizations

IX

x General Editors' Preface

function within contexts where conflict is central, the strategies they devise, how they set their aims, how fixed and immutable these aims are, and how these organizations define and understand success and failure.

The book is therefore a valuable and innovative contribution to thinking about inter-group conflict from a clearly defined conceptual position, with carefully chosen case-studies that provide consider­able powers of clarification and illumination.

Isaiah Berlin argued that, in human life, we are doomed to choose and that every choice may entail an irreparable loss; it followed that it is our ability to comprehend and internalize moral worlds different from our own, with all their resonances and historical power, that can underwrite the notion of an acceptable and humane society. This book makes an important contribution to the pursuit of this aspiration.

Seamus Dunn Valerie Morgan

Preface

The origin of the project presented in this book is our belief that good intentions and fervent hopes are necessary but insufficient components of effective peacemaking in ethnic conflicts. Although we have no doubt that continued efforts to build and sustain dur­able peace requires a significant 'leap of faith', we also are convinced that it is crucial to understand, better than we do now, how and why conflict resolution is effective and when it is not.

Answering these questions is not necessarily easy because con­flict resolution is complex in a number of ways. First there are the disputing parties' strong feelings which often lead them to resist efforts to end a conflict or lower its intensity. Second, intense ethnic conflicts are never simple; they involve multiple issues and multiple actors and are both domestic and international in nature; and they are about specific interests and deeply-held identities. Often disputants themselves disagree about what is at the core of a con­flict. Third, conflicts change over time as new parties become involved and new issues emerge. As a result conflict resolution efforts need to understand the complexity of each individual dispute and to respect the specific cultural context in which it occurs. Finally, we find Boutros Boutros-Ghali's distinction between peacekeeping, peacemaking, peace building, especially useful in reminding us about the multiple stages and tasks involved in comprehensive and constructive conflict resolution.

A central goal of the project we present in this book is to en­courage dialogue and self-awareness concerning both the goals conflict resolution seeks to attain in particular situations and assessment of the extent to which they are actually achieved among those interested in improving dispute resolution practice. We believe, furthermore, that explicit identification of goals will help clarify underlying assumptions about why and how their achievement can help build and sustain more or less peaceful relations among groups which had previously been engaged in destructive conflict.

To some it may seem that we are reluctant to simply use the word evaluation and to say that ethnic conflict resolution work needs to be systematically evaluated just as other practice is. While we agree that evaluation is central to the issues we raise, there are

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xii Preface

also important issues to consider concerning the standards by which a project is evaluated, who does the evaluation and the extent to which it is a central part of project design and implementation. We suggest that appropriate and effective evaluation can only take place when it is clear what the specific goals are which particular conflict resolution initiatives hope to obtain, and when evaluation is part and parcel of project design and not simply seen as an ex­ternal imposition to satisfy funders. Indeed, the more ongoing reflections and evaluation can be integrated into the development and implementation of conflict resolution initiatives, the more likely it is that definitions of success will be self-fulfilling. Clarity of pur­pose and rigorous and ongoing reflection on that purpose enhances the likelihood of achieving it.

Many ethnic conflict resolution projects we encountered are able to clearly articulate what they hope to achieve - at least in the short-run. However, even in some of these cases, project goals are relatively vague or so unrelated to a project's specific activities that it is hard to imagine what effective evaluation could look like. In other cases there is not necessarily a very clear sense of how specific activities are related to the clear goals which are articulated.

A real surprise that we have encountered in the course of this research is that few projects give very much systematic thought to the question of how their specific activities (and often we are talk­ing about small NGOs and community groups) might have a meaningful impact on the larger conflict in which they are embed­ded. As a result, many observers see conflict resolution work as either ineffective or naive.

Another unexpected finding is that there are often significant differences in the goals various actors in projects articulate. For example, we find that sponsors, funders and often project initia­tors often have large scale goals such as developing models for establishing democratic institutions which link a project to larger social contexts, while project participants closer to the ground often articulate more immediate concerns such as improving their daily lives and educating their children. Therefore, there is a real need for articulating and integrating different types of goals within single projects as well as linking them to wider social contexts in ways that educate observers about the complexity of success and its achievement.

As a result, we believe that greater attention to the question of what various stakeholders in conflict resolution projects hope to

Preface Xlll

achieve and why and how they think achieving these goals can make a difference will both improve overall practice and will encourage practitioners to make mid-course corrections and adjustments which respond to both changing situations in which conflicts occur and to their own sense of what is working and what is not. It should also increase the understanding of conflict resolution more broadly and increase appreciation for the successes it achieves.

We asked each of the authors of the cases presented in this book to approach the question of evaluation not by judging the success or failure of the projects they examined, but rather by trying to understand what it is that each project hoped to achieve and how the project initiators thought that achieving these goals would matter. Getting project directors or conflict resolution workers to articu­late their goals is not necessarily an easy matter, however. Often we found that people we interviewed take both their goals and procedures so much for granted that articulating them in nuanced ways was difficult for many to do. We should add, however, that often afterwards we were told that they found the effort to do so was quite helpful.

The wide range of goals and the varying ability to delineate them which is reflected in the articles suggests that the task of goal ar­ticulation and subsequent reflection on both the nature of the goals and the extent to which they have (or can be) achieved is complex. We hope that the pieces included in this book increase the reader's understanding of the wide range of project goals which exist in the field and the very different languages and frameworks used to articulate them.

Evaluation is an increasingly common concern as the field of conflict resolution matures and is now frequently called upon to justify and be accountable for its efforts. As the field seeks to do old things, like resolve conflicts, in new ways that are more appropri­ate to the task at hand, some tried and true methods of assessment will certainly be of use. New methods and new thinking about assess­ment are necessary too. We hope this book makes a contribution to that effort.

A number of people and organizations have been particularly helpful to us in the course of this project. The Pew Charitable Trusts generously provided the financial support which made this work possible, and Steve Del Russo, then a programme officer at Pew, offered encouragement, suggestions, and advice every step of the way. His faith in conflict resolution practices combined with

XIV Preface

his concern that the interests of funders, practitioners and the people caught in ethnic strife will all be better served by more effective evaluation helped us clarify what it was we most needed to do. The Peace Studies Program at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges provided a setting in which we were able to organize our data col­lection and analysis and engage in long reflective conversations with colleagues and students. In December 1994, Haverford College generously provided support for a small conference 'Evaluating Evaluation' where we brought together almost three dozen schol­ars and practitioners to consider the scientific, ethical and political questions surrounding evaluation in ethnic conflict resolution. We want to particularly thank Larry Susskind, Nadim Rouhana, Harold Saunders, Joe Montville, Joe Folger, Harvey Glickman, David Smock, Lewis Rasmussen, Heather McHugh, Donald Campbell, Fredrick Steier, Jaco Cilliers, Lori Gronich, Robert Mulvihill, Ann Lesch, Margard Smith and Michael van Slyck for their participation in the meeting and for their contributions to the lively discussions we had which are captured in Joseph Folger's chapter in this book.

Jean Paul Lederach, Chris Mitchell, and Chris Moore agreed to participate in a session at the European Conference on Peace Making and Conflict Resolution in San Sebastian, Spain, in 1994, where we asked each of them to talk about questions of goal setting and evaluation in their own work as part of our effort to legitimate open dialogue around what has been a difficult subject for many practitioners to talk about openly. Mitchell's chapter in the book is drawn from this presentation.

John Darby read the entire manuscript providing many useful ideas including that we try to find a way to address our concerns to the general public including politicians who are often skeptical of an connection between many conflict resolution initiatives and change. He suggested that this skepticism can damage the morale of activists and contributed to creating 'the political theater in which the initiatives are operating and it often does influence the atti­tudes of policy-makers and funding bodies towards the interventions'. We don't think we do justice to this interesting idea in the volume but we hope that others can find ways to use what is here to address similarly important issues.

Notes on the Contributors

Miek BoItjes is Director of the ADR Centre for Commerce and Industry, and Program Director at the Baah Management Center of the Dutch Confederation of Industry and Employers UNO-NEW, both in the Netherlands. She is a mediator and a trainer in nego­tiation and conflict resolution.

Jaco Cilliers is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Conflict Resolution and Analysis at George Mason University. He is a Fulbright Scholar from South Africa who has extensive international conflict management experience, the most recent working for twenty months in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Tamra Pearson d'Estree is Associate Professor in the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. She earned her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Harvard University and then spent seven years at the University of Arizona where she was a fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Udall Center for Social and Public Policy. Her research includes studies on evaluation in environmental, community, and intercommunal conflict resolution, and she has written several articles and book chapters on intergroup relationships and interactive processes.

Joseph P. Folger is a Professor of Communications Sciences at Temple University where he also serves as the Assistant Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the School of Communications. His re­search focuses on the links between ideology and third party conflict intervention. His books include The Promise of Mediation: Responding to Conflict Through Empowerment and Recognition (Jossey-Bass) and Working Through Conflict: Strategies for Relationships, Groups, and Organizations (Longman).

David Gorman is currently Oxfam GB Country Programme Man­ager in Liberia and previously spent three years in the Middle East where he worked to revolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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xvi Notes on the Contributors

Janie Leatherman is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Illinois State University. She has conducted research and written in the area of conflict resolution and conflict early warning and prevention. She has also consulted for the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations University, the United States Insti­tute for Peace, Catholic Relief Services and the Brookings Institution, particularly on projects related the early warning of conflict, its prevention, and resolution.

Karin Lucke is currently the Coordinator of the Vukovar Office of the Human Rights Field Operation Croatia of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in the Republic of Croatia. She holds a Masters of International Affairs from Colum­bia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

Christopher Mitchell is the Drucie French Cumbie Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, Virginia, where he teaches both Master's and Doctoral programs at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. He recently co-authored The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: The Analytical Problem-Solving Approach with Michael Banks.

Meltem Muftuler-Bac is Associate Chair of the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Ankara Turkey. She re­ceived her Ph.D. from Temple University. She has written Turkey's Relations with a Changing Europe (Manchester University Press) and has published articles Middle Eastern Studies, Futures, Security Dialogue, and the Mediterranean Quarterly.

Robert F. Mulvihill is Professor of Political Sciences at Rosemont College. He is the co-author of Paths to a Settlement: Approaches to Peacemaking in Northern Ireland. He has also written articles and papers on various psychological and cultural components of the Northern Ireland conflict and is especially interested in the emotional consequences of conflictual relationships.

Marc Howard Ross is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of Politi­cal Science at Bryn Mawr College. He is the author of The Culture of Conflict: Interpretations and Interests in Comparative Perspective and The Management of Conflict: Interpretations and Interests in Comparative Perspective both published by Yale University Press and a number of articles on ethnic conflict and its management.

Notes on the Contributors XVll

Jay Rothman is the Director of the ARIA Group, Inc (http:// www.ariagroup.com). which provides conflict resolution consultation and training to the public and private sector. He is also Scholar­in-Residence at the McGregor School of Antioch University where he directs the Action Evaluation Research Initiative. He is author of Resolving Identity-Based Conflict in Nations Organizations and Com­munities (Jossey-Bass).